ConsoleKit Removal/Automatic Multi-Seat Support

Summary

A grab-bag of little cleanups and improvements all related to session and seat handling.

Owner

Name: Lennart Poettering
Email: lennart AT poettering DOT net

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 16
Last updated: 2011-07-18
Percentage of completion: 50%

Logic is now in Fedora, patches for some subsystems (X11, accountsservice) ready.

Detailed Description

Simplify our stack by removing CK
Automatic multi-seat support
Make systemd available in the session
Removal of XDG_SESSION_COOKIE and its security problems, emphasis on audit loginuid and cgroup names instead
On-Demand starting of VT gettys
Fix the 63 threads CK VT watching issue
Covering all of getty, SSH and X11 sessions
Make session exit of pam_systemd more robust
Introduce D-Bus user bus
allow systemd user services to be run outside of a session, for selected users, a la cron with cron.allow

Benefit to Fedora

Things become safer, cleaner and smaller. We add automatic multi-seat support. We can optionally start user services outside of a login (i.e. a user Rygel on boot without having the user to log in).

Scope

Precise scope outlined in:

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_ev4f0gwBuvs6SH_N8fN5LO4LV3sbwtJsLq52F_wwpU

Here is the list of packages that currently require ConsoleKit:

libfprint
polkit
accountsservice
gdm

There is a larger set of modules that are using the ConsoleKit api at runtime, including:

gnome-session
gnome-power-manager
gnome-packagekit
gnome-settings-daemon
control-center
gnome-screensaver
nautilus
udisks

How To Test

Test Multi-Seat support (ideally with hardware from plugable): plug in plugable hw and you should instantly get a new gdm display on the seat
You should have 6 gettys on tty1-6

User Experience

Plugging in certain multi-seat hw should just work: i.e. make a gdm appear on it.

Dependencies

We need smaller changes in: X11, gdm, CK, udev, dbus, plymouth, PK, NM, accountsservice

For details see https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1_ev4f0gwBuvs6SH_N8fN5LO4LV3sbwtJsLq52F_wwpU

Contingency Plan

CK will continue to be available simutaneously as the new logic. To revert back we can just disable our systemd specific login manager again and things should work as previously.

Documentation